http://duotytoalba.bandcamp.com/track/7-trio
As a precursor to anything ever written I beg the question: Why doesn’t everyone like listening to freely improvised music? I seriously pose this even though in truth I know it is difficult to understand such a broad range of human emotions, and emotions hurt.
Music of this ilk will not say it to your face. Not to say it’s purely expressive. Just that in order to participate you must follow as it forms, track the texture, recall the rate of change. In committing to this process you are transformed by it. You begin to see where they are coming from, these obscure trios of people mostly in major cities but also living and recording in basements, surviving off pickles (though probably not the trio in question here), pulling hearts and absurdity out of neighboring flutes, picks, soundposts. You have to let them draw it out of you as they draw it out of each other. You have to be able to draw music. You need to grasp the point at which the classical and metaphonic collide. (With an Oracle).
Duo Tyto Alba is a good example of this and why. There is a calligraphic quality to each instrument, almost Zenly proportioned but intersecting illegibly to the degree that the event is undermined. Was it the event? Was it the following note? What happened before that? You must track clearly, adopting the pose of an organist, or an owl. (Maybe this is how an owl sees). (And here, freely improvised music becomes an argument for the non-existence of Chaos).
You want to turn it off sometimes, the Chaos, and you can’t, because it gets to be too much and you know it, emotional truth, and so you put something other in it’s place; memory/magnet/mute, and in doing so the sonic structure strengthens, as an intentionally improvised universe is always more interesting than one neglected, or masterminded. Strata or Death. The sound of a room. Insectivorous guitars and essential tremors. A poem about prosopagnosia, lost at sea. Something difficult to grasp that maintains it’s character. Schizophrenic cave drawings (perhaps). A bassist locked in a closet in a landmark hotel. Something worth praying to. This album maybe evokes these dreams. Also it features some excellent flute playing.
thesupercoda 